Is Google going to punish your forum for being too slow?

Stuart Wright

Well-known member
Not sure whether this is the most appropriate forum. This thread includes very broad suggestions.
So with Chrome (the most popular browser), Google is going to punish slower sites by displaying a message that the site may be slow to load (instead of sowing the site until it has loaded). This will encourage people to bounce away from the site.

With the Chrome plugin Lighthouse, even Xenforo.com/community only scores 63/100.
1576713647277.png
You may not agree with some of the metrics being used to determine whether sites are slow or fast, but this is the strong arm of Google we're talking about.
So we're going to need to look at speeding up our sites and some of that is likely to need to start with Xenforo itself.
Like lazy image loading avatars and serving images in more modern formats where supported and being more efficient with JS & CSS.
These may individually only make tiny differences, but Google is waving a stick at us, telling us they are important.

The performance score of AVForums.com/forums is 22!!!! I have a lot of work to do.

Anyone got any thoughts about this?
 
My thoughts I posted at following links
Google PageSpeed Insights v5 based on Google Lighthouse is heavily weighted towards interactive and speedindex and first contentful paint metrics on 3G moto g4/nexus 5 device emulation. So for dynamic and javascript heavy sites, 3G mobile score or heavily render blocked asset based sites, the score will be lower. From v5 API this is the weighting used to determine the score
  • interactive 5
  • speed-index 4
  • first-contentful-paint 3
  • first-cpu-idle 2
  • first-meaningful-paint 1
You really shouldn’t look at the overall scores but the metric’s values measured over time to get your relative page speed. Field data origin summary would be that over time measurement rather than the lab data scores which is what the score rating is measured from.

According Chrome Dev Summit talks/slides looks like in January 2020, Google Lighthouse v6 will be released so Google PageSpeed Insights v6 will be out too. They are adjusting the weighting and adding new metrics for the Pagespeed score - moving First Contentful Paint (FCP) to a higher weighting than it has in Google PageSpeed v5 and also adding a Total Blocking Time (TBT) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCF) metric
To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
. Both First CPU Idle and First Meaningful Paint (FMP) metrics are being removed.

This also makes sense with Google Webmaster Console adding a new Speed Report which also evaluates and displays page speed based on First Contentful Paint (FCP) and First Input Delay (FID) https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/11/search-console-speed-report.html

Actual Google Dev Summit 2019 Youtube session that talks about this is here.

According to data compiled by Web Almanac 2019 By HTTP Archive, First Contentful Paint (FCP) metric is highly influenced by the type of device (desktop/mobile), ISP connection speed and geography
 
The thing is, almost all CMS perform poorly on Lighthouse. You will actually have to build and maintain your software to be rated best with Lighthouse. If you are using standard CMS like WordPress or other popular names, there is a good chance that you are even with your competitor.
 
The thing is, almost all CMS perform poorly on Lighthouse. You will actually have to build and maintain your software to be rated best with Lighthouse. If you are using standard CMS like WordPress or other popular names, there is a good chance that you are even with your competitor.
Still can work towards optimisation. My Wordpress has been highly tuned but yeah no Adsense and no jQuery makes a huge difference :)

gpsi-servermanager.guide-desktop-01.png gpsi-servermanager.guide-mobile-01.png

And test XF 2.1 forum optimised for page speed with 37K posts no adsense just google analytics

gpsi-xf21-testforum-mobile-01.webp gpsi-xf21-testforum-desktop-01.webp
 
Top Bottom